From the memorial service...

It is a week since Leslie died and his disappearance has grown heavier for me - precisely because it is a week.

For it was week after week, for 25 years, first with the Magnolia Circle and then with another Reading group, that Leslie and I would come together to read and discuss Philosophy.

Leslie was a magnificent teacher of Philosophy - there are generations of students who are lucky to have had him as their professor. I know they are very grateful.

But allow me to say just a word about Leslie - the man he was, not the professor. For it is this man that I will miss dearly, this is the man that I encountered week after week: a man who was a philosopher and a sensualist. Not a usual combination!

As a philosopher he was a person with an unshakeable earthly, realism and common sense. Leslie had no taste for flights of fancy, mythologies, religious consolatory systems or mystical claims. The world for Leslie was this material world and no other. Week after week, but with increasing sophistication he would defend his Realism vis-à-vis Bruce Leutwyler’s radically different ontology. We all learned so much from these exchanges.

And quite consistently it was in this world that Leslie conducted his life. He loved this life – he was no ascetic philosopher!- he loved the sensuality of life, the pleasurable, the agreeable, the amiable life. And he loved it above all taken with sense of humor and a great sense of the absurd. Yes, he was all this, and he was also an admirable, thoughtful and consistent atheist.

Sensuality, intelligence and humor – in my book that’s not bad at all!

To loose a friend with such qualities is no small matter, but for Leslie to be cut so short from life - 54 years! - this is truly tragic.

I so much would like to have Leslie alive again so that HE may get more out of life and I could enjoy – surely with renewed appreciation – his being.

--Fernando Casas